Glass brick walls are known, i.e. walls made with hollow glass blocks, commonly called glass bricks, joined together by cement mortar to provide stability thereto.
Known glass bricks are of parallelepiped shape with two square or rectangular faces which, when the element is installed, form the inner and outer exposed surfaces, and a perimetral band of lesser width which joins the two exposed faces together and remains slightly inwards of their edge to define, when laid, horizontal and vertical channels for containing the cement mortar which securely joins the bricks together.
To form the wall, the end glass brick of the lower row is firstly laid on an underlying mortar bed, after which the glass bricks of the lower row are placed one after the other against the preceding, after interposing therebetween some mortar and a spacer provided at its ends with centering elements. After completing the first row the next row is laid, and so on, until the entire wall is formed. On termination, after the mortar has set, the centering elements of the spacers are removed, the gaps are filled and the formed wall is cleaned.
This method, which is virtually the most widespread, is substantially imposed by the shape of current glass bricks, which has brought to light a series of drawbacks.
One of these drawbacks is that during application of the cement mortar between one glass brick and the next, the cement mortar can escape through the gaps between them; this suggests that only the strictly necessary mortar quantity, or even less, should be used, even though this expedient has not proved satisfactory in practice and a certain quantity of mortar still has to be removed from the formed wall.
Another drawback is that, as mortar can often deposit between the spacers and the relative centering elements, removable only after the mortar has set, such removal can result in a time loss for its removal and a difficult surface-finishing of the wall.
Another drawback is that the slow mortar setting rate, due to lack of water absorption by the glass, means that the laying of the glass bricks has to be periodically suspended to enable the mortar to set, otherwise the wall could deform.
Another drawback is that the need to fill the gaps between the glass bricks results in lengthy and laborious operations.